Royal Academy, London
Naked men cruise, fight and flagellate, nude nymphs brandish whips, and creatures ambush sleeping maidens. What an astonishing show – I could look all day
Full of surprises, and a few shocks, sexy, sacred and profane, The Renaissance Nude is almost as salacious as it is scholarly. With substantial loans from all over Europe and the US, the exhibition has travelled from the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and now fills the Sackler galleries at the Royal Academy.
It is a riot of bodies in these low-lit, sober grey rooms. Christian martyrs are impaled on trees. Jan Gossaert’s Christ, stripped, awaits his fate, sitting on the cold stone and wracked with palpable terror. Several Saint Sebastians stand about, pin-up boys oblivious to the arrows that pierce them. A procession of flaggelants in a Netherlandish Book of Hours prepare themselves for their hooded tormentors in a scene as erotic as it is devotional. The delicacy and intimacy of the image counterpoints its impending violence. Titian’s Venus Anadyomene rises from the waters, wringing her hair, fully exposed and oblivious to the spectator. Peering to the side, she doesn’t see us looking, or pretends as much. Perhaps this is Titian’s double bluff (she knows that we know … except of course, she is only painted).
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